Going Local

Tattle

It's the season for software producers to become broadcasters. First, TV Today converted its current affairs bulletin on Doordarshan into a full-fledged news channel.

Prannoy Roy's NDTV followed suit. And Rajat Sharma has declared his intentions of launching a news channel in January.

However, the information & broadcasting ministry has got yet another application to launch a channel "� a news and entertainment channel for the National Capital Region.

The applicant? Moving Picture owner Ramesh Sharma. The documentary film maker and producer of shows for Doordarshan has applied for a licence to uplink out of India. Ministry sources say that this is the first application for permission to launch a local channel.

No changes here

Star News has complied and so has CNBC. But Zee News has still to lower the foreign equity stake in the company to 26 per cent in line with the government's media policy on news channels.

In March this year, news channels like CNBC and Zee News were allowed a year to change their equity structure. But if well-placed sources in Zee Telefilms are to be believed, altering the news channel equity structure is not on the horizon.

Their reasoning: the date for implementing the new policy is not clear since Star News continued to get weekly extensions for conforming to the policy.

Besides, there have been no communications on the issue from the ministry.

Poaching people

Not only are code division multiple access (CDMA)-mobile service companies operators weaning away customers from global system for mobile (GSM)-based cellular service companies but they're poaching top GSM company executives too.

The latest executive to shift to the CDMA camp is Himanshu Kapania, chief operating officer of Idea Cellular's Delhi circle. Kapania now heads Reliance Infocomm's operations in Haryana and Punjab.

Earlier, Rajiv Burman, head of Escotel's marketing, moved to head Tata Teleservices CDMA operations in Delhi. Atul Jhamb, who was looking after Bharti's Mumbai circle, too crossed over to Reliance Infocomm.